DOWNTIME; Soccer Fans Find New Ways To Root for Faraway Favorites

ONE of the first purchases Jim McGinn's father made after the family moved from Glasgow to New York in 1956 was a shortwave radio.

''He found the BBC World Service, and every Saturday we'd be glued to the radio,'' the younger McGinn recalled fondly. Members of the family listened for results from the Scottish soccer leagues and especially their beloved Celtic Football Club.

''If even the word Celtic was mentioned, there would be a glow to our faces,'' Mr. McGinn said.

The technology is more sophisticated today, but the passion is still elemental. Soccer, the most international sport, has followers all over the globe, a large percentage of them far from the teams that stir their deepest loyalties.

If you are an American supporter of Manchester United, perhaps the most widely marketed soccer team in the world, you will not have much of a problem keeping up with your team. The English Premier League, the major league of English soccer, has a pay-per-view hookup with a game available weekly in the United States, and Fox Sports World does a Sunday evening highlights program that invariably features one of the glamour teams like Manchester United, Arsenal or Liverpool. Similarly, followers of the Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga or Spanish Liga Primera, equivalents of the Premier League, can count on fax and ESPN to provide weekly action.

But for fans whose teams have slipped a little out of the limelight, or whose preferred league is a notch below those exalted heights, a little ingenuity is required, along with, if possible, an up-to-date computer setup.

With the advent of the Internet, E-mail lists and chat rooms, Liverpool fans can follow their team from Singapore, and displaced Glaswegians can root for Celtic from a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. An expatriate Spaniard living in London continues a third-generation affair with Real Madrid at the same time that a group of Greek-Americans in Boston worship AEK Athens. Major soccer leagues all over the world began play in August, and fans are scrambling to follow the action.

Jim McGough, a Web developer in San Francisco, has followed the Amsterdam team Ajax since he became friends with a Dutch graduate student nearly a decade ago. When ESPN carried Dutch First Division games, the dominant Ajax team was often featured. But those telecasts stopped two seasons ago, and Mr. McGough had to look elsewhere.

''We all hooked up through an Amsterdam-based list-serve for fans of the team,'' he wrote via E-mail. ''I started a Web page called Ajax USA (www.ajax-usa.com/ajax), and that quickly turned into more of a supporters' club.'' He added, ''It was amazing how many people joined our club, even though we offered no real benefits and had no official association with AFC Ajax. People were just desperate to 'belong' to Ajax in some way.'' His club now has more than 1,000 members in about 20 countries.

Mr. McGough sends E-mail messages to the members after every game with the score and a summary, and, relying on the Ajax list-serve, he posts news and gossip daily.

''The second time I went to Amsterdam, I stayed with some friends whom I had never met before, and whom I only knew through Ajax USA and the Ajax list-serve,'' Mr. McGough wrote. ''I simply sent E-mail asking if they would put me up for two weeks, arrange for match tickets and show me the sights, and they agreed. It worked out great, and they have since been to stay with us here in California.''

Jane White, a Tottenham Hotspur fan, runs one of several E-mail lists dedicated to that team, based in London. At her job at the Columbia University Center for the Humanities, she follows the team on the site for Soccernet (www.soccernet.com), which updates scores throughout games. For the World Cup, she added to her desktop a soccer-only news feed from www.worldsoccernews. com.

In London, Gonzalo San Martin carries on a love affair with Real Madrid that he inherited from his father and grandfather. He has an elegant Web site, in Spanish and English, on the legendary team (www.yrl.co.uk./gonzalo/ rm/rm.html).

''I regularly get E-mails from all around the world because of my Web page,'' he wrote in an E-mail note. ''They write from places like Thailand, Morocco, Israel and Russia, not to mention most of the rest of Europe, the States and South America.''

Many teams have made their radio broadcasts available on the Internet through Real Audio technology. The Web site Soccer on the Radio (sefl.satelnet.org/philsoc/socrad) is devoted to listing and linking to several dozen other on-line broadcasting sites, and it also tells where to find conventional radio broadcasts of the game.

Fans of teams whose match broadcasts are not found on the Internet can find some solace in the existence of I.R.C., or Internet Relay Chat, and chat rooms. Chat rooms devoted to a single soccer team will often offer a typed-in relay of the game action courtesy of a dedicated (some might say masochistic) local follower who sits by a television with a computer at the ready for the benefit of the less fortunate.

The followers of Liverpool, a Premier League team, have gone the I.R.C. route one better. Richard Lloyd and other Liverpool fans maintain a site dedicated to the team (anfield.merseyworld.com) and have developed software called Commentator, which enables someone not only to type in running play-by-play accounts but also to keep complete team lineups on screen with a running game clock and to note important events (fouls, shots on goal, goals and so on ) in a separate field.

''Commentator is cheaper (and uses far less bandwidth) than Real Audio, works on any platform that has Java and is better than a chat room or I.R.C. commentary,'' Mr. Lloyd said via E-mail. ''One clear problem of I.R.C. or chat-room game replay is knowing the team lineup, score, cards, game events and elapsed time without having to either ask continually in the chat room or have a refresh timer on the Web page (which is inefficient and heavily loads the Web server).''

The increased availability of satellite programming in bars, restaurants and clubs has made it easier for fans to congregate at the nearest friendly watering hole that is willing to dedicate at least one screen to soccer on a Saturday morning. Mr. McGinn's group, the New York Celtic Supporters Club, takes over Boomer's Sports Bar (77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue) several times a month in the fall and winter to watch the Glasgow side.

For some fans, though, there is a downside to the growing accessibility of soccer news. Peter Spenser, a 44-year-old management consultant, put it bluntly. Sitting glumly in Kavanaugh's, at Third Avenue and 33d Street, waiting for the satellite broadcast of a Tottenham Hotspur game to begin, he talked about the team's recent decline.

''When I came to the United States from London 17 years ago, Spurs were playing well, but I couldn't keep up with them,'' Mr. Spenser said. ''Now I check Soccernet, the Spurs Web site, my E-mail, all day. The explosion of new technology has made it possible for me to really suffer.''